Comment by sajithdilshan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sajithdilshan | Hacker News Reader

The video on cooling is quite vague, maybe on purpose to not give away proprietary technology. But I'm truly curious as to how they can dissipate the heat once they move it from TPUs into radiators.

As mentioned in the video in the void the only way they can remove heat from the radiator is via radiation, but that is extremely slow and ultimately the rate of heat generation in TPUs would be higher than the dissipation rate of the radiators and the whole thing would get heated up over time.

  >radiation is extremely slow and ultimately the rate of heat generation in TPUs would be higher than the dissipation rate of the radiators

"Doctor, it hurts when I do this!" So don't do that. :-)

Properly size the radiators (ie solve the aforementioned 'extremely slow' black body equation in reverse) and you won't have a problem.

I wonder if a technique to pack crazy high amounts of heat in a small mass and just eject it in an orbit to the sun would be viable. Probably not, but the idea of a datacenter pooping its heat into little pellets is quite entertaining. Like Lila's pet from Futurama.

It would take more energy than all the satellites put together to drop heat pellets into the sun.

This is being done using ammonia. For every tonne of compute, add at least four tons of cooling, not counting the chassis.

Here's a recent talk about the ridiculousness² of building compute in space: https://youtu.be/eo7MEPgWGic

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